Analyzing Critical Thinking

To better understand the concept of critical thinking, and how you can better develop it in your own life, let’s take a moment to analyze critical thinking.

There have been several incredible critical thinkers in history. Here is a list of a few of the greatest:

•Isaac Newton

•Plato

•David Hugh

•Socrates

•Aristotle

•Buddha

Of course these are only to name a few. The list goes on and on with various doctors, philosophers, gurus, and so on. There are two primary things that all of these men, along with the rest of the critical thinkers in history, all have in common.

If you choose to study any one of them individually, you won’t have to look very hard before you see that they all:

1.Were deep thinkers

2.Were independent thinkers

There it is again, if you noticed. That word, independent. The entire core of the idea of critical thinking is that it is independent.

We can’t emphasize enough in this book how important it is for you to learn to think for yourself.

We live in a very privileged world. We have all the information in the world… quite literally, in fact, right at our fingertips with the internet. If you wanted to, you can get online, learn how to build an airplane, a light bulb, and why cardinals don’t migrate in the fall, then follow it up with the best cake recipe to take to that party tomorrow.

We are given access to more information in less time than ever before. Anyone on the planet with access to a computer literally has anything that they have ever wanted to know right at their fingertips. There are a lot of pros to this, but there is also one major con that stands out above the rest.

We have lost the need to think about things.

You don’t have to think or solve issues anymore. If something is in the way of your progress, all you have to do is pull out your smart phone and Google it. There you have your answer, then you work through the issue, and forget about it.

You didn’t learn anything, you just got through whatever it was that was holding you back at that moment.

A lot is lost in this way of life. What happens is that we end up adopting the opinion or solution of the person that we read about online, and we don’t gain the understanding of how to solve the problem ourselves.

The ability to solve and understand the solution to a problem is key in learning how to use critical thinking to solve your other life problems.

Remember when you were in school, and you were taking geometry? You were given problems and theorems to solve those problems, which you did with ease. You knew that if you followed the formula, you were going to end up with the right answer.

It was all relatively easy to figure out, until you were asked to prove why the theorem worked. This opened up an entire new ballgame, because you weren’t going to just figure out the answer, but you were going to figure out why the answer was what it was.

When you worked with these proofs, you became a master in the art of geometry. You may not be able to build a building, and you may not be able to repeat every law of geometry as it is written, but you do have an understanding of why things work the way they do in the geometric world.

All of the sudden, circles and squares and triangles all mean something again, and you can make sense of the areas and perimeters. It is more than just knowing that 2+2=4… you know why 2+2=4.

Sure, this wasn’t fun for any of us to do, but at the end of the class, and at the end of the day, we were learning how to solve a problem. You understood the why behind the solution, and that is what set you apart as a critical thinker.